The two best books I read this year, and have been recommending widely are:
"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by Graeber and Wengrow since it really shows how narrow our political imagination has been for the last 250 years, and makes me excited by people looking for new ways to organize.
"The Ministry for the Future" by KSR, which has further radicalized me and challenged me to spend more of my time fighting the climate crisis.
Fighting climate change… what do you have in mind… what can folks in (soft) tech do?
I’m equally interested but lacking in imagination currently how software can have a bigger impact.
All the big impactful things are in hard tech, ie changing industrial processes, new / improved material design, renewable energy production, reducing energy waste or waste in general etc and planting tons and tons of trees at scale - best carbon capture and ecosystem restoration tech we have I think.
But for all that we need to have the political will, which is not sufficiently present at the moment. Too many counter forces preventing systems change. So how do you address that?
If you could come up with an effective method of combating stupid on internet you could have an immense effect on climate change. Or trolls or fossil shills or bad faith actors etc.
Even solar power needs interfaces. One of those interfaces will likely be through the Web. There will be work to be done that requires normal Web dev in that area.
"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by Graeber and Wengrow since it really shows how narrow our political imagination has been for the last 250 years, and makes me excited by people looking for new ways to organize.
"The Ministry for the Future" by KSR, which has further radicalized me and challenged me to spend more of my time fighting the climate crisis.
[edited for formatting]